A very basic question for this course is: What counts as an explanation
or a justification for an assertion (for issues in the relationship
between society and technology)? In the absence of precise and explicitly
articulated theories, so called folk theories, or cultural
mythologies or myths, or entrenched metaphors, will come
to dominate our thought; these are widely shared, implicit, unarticulated, and
superficially plausible beliefs, which generally fall under the rubric of
"common sense." Every culture, including our own, has such theories, which
embody and help to transmit its values. The following are two examples of
such folk theories (although they have also been stated more formally):

Technological determinism is the theory that technology is an
autonomous force that changes society. This provides explanations for many
changes that can be observed in society, and it has a very simple cause/effect
form. However, this theory is false; if you think you have an
instance, it means you are looking at just one part of a much more complex
situation, and ignoring the complex social network that supports the
technology.

Social determinism is the theory that society is an autonomous
force that changes technology. This provides explanations for many changes
that can be observed in technology, and it also has a very simple cause/effect
form. It is the converse of technological determinism, and it is also
false: if you think you have an instance, it probably means you are
looking at just one part of a much more complex situation, and ignoring some
of its significant technical aspects.

Here society does not refer just to individuals, but rather to
collections of individuals that share values, amd are communicating and having
effects as a group. So an effect of technology on an individual, or even on a
set of individuals, could not be technological determinism, even if we could
argue that that effect was inevitable and without any social context (which I
believe is anyway impossible). Similarly, social determinism cannot refer to
the effects of individuals as mere individuals on technology.

It is important to notice how often, and how effectively, technological
determinism is used in advertising and other texts (in this course, we
will use the word "text' in the very general sense of any communicative object
in any medium - e.g., it could refer to TV commercials, cartoons, or stop
signs) the primary purpose of which is persuasion. This is easily observed in
technology advertisements in newspapers, magazines, and TV. It is interesting
to ask why this invalid form of argument is so common and so
effective. We will address this below, especially in Section 3.1 of the class notes. Of course, the fact
that a false theory is commonly used for persuasion is a significant moral
issue.

Both technological and social determinism come in hard and
soft forms, where the soft form only claims that this is one influence
among many, and not an absolute determinant, while the hard form claims that
the force is dominant and irresistible. Let's look at two simple examples:

Cellphones will improve family life.

Cellphones will help to improve family life.

The first of these expresses hard technological determinism, while the
second expresses soft technological determinism, because the verb "help"
implies that there may be other causal factors.

A myth that is closely related to technological determinism is that
technological progress is inevitable, and inevitably leads to social progress.
Most of us know that this is not really true, but we still have somehow
internalized it. Of course, technology has continued to evolve for a long
time, but whether its results can always be called progress is open
to debate, in several different ways. One problem is defining progress. But
if we look at specific cases, most of us can probably agree about the
outcomes. It is all too easy to think of examples where technology has had
positive outcomes, so let's consider some cases where the outcome is (most
likely agreed to be) negative.

Weapons have certainly evolved enormously over the last few centuries. But
are their effects on human society positive? For an extreme case, imagine
that each adult human has a hydrogen bomb, with detonator built into their
hand (or mouth or whatever); most of us probably get mad enough occasionally
that we might actually use such a weapon to get rid of someone who really
annoys us, even though it also gets rid of us and a few million others at the
same time. Are the availability of handguns, laser sights, silencers, assult
rifles, Uzzi's, AK-47's, the ease of making chemical and biological weapons,
etc., really contributing to the general health and happiness of humanity? (I
recently read that the ongoing development of lighter weight automatic weapons
has made it possible for younger and younger children to participate in
warfare, so that there is now a higher than ever death rate for children in
war, especially in Africa.)

Or how about the recent rapid progress in highly addictive drugs (e.g.,
crack cocaine)? Also cars have been a mixed blessing, with one negative side
effect being the impoverishment of many city centers, due to a migration of
the middle class to the suburbs. It is also debatable (and in fact much
debated) whether progress in IT will necessarily translate into progress in
the delivery of education. We will see several other examples later in the
course.

The general form of a hard technologically deterministic statement is

T => S ,

where T is some technological phenomenon,
S is some social phenomenon, and => indicates implication. Similarly, the general form of
a hard socially deterministic statement is

S => T ,

which is exactly the converse of that for technological determinism. Each of
these two kinds of hard determinism is false, and it is very easy to find
counter examples. For technological determinism, these would be technologies
that have been integrated with different social environments in quite
different ways. (Just to be specific, we could mention nuclear energy in the
Ukraine, Japan and North Korea; or television in China, the UK, and the US.)
Some counter examples to social determinism are given below.

However, most people, even social scientists, often make statements having
these forms, and in fact, it is reasonable to do so when the statement only
serves as a "headline," a title, or an abbreviation for a more detailed and
qualified statement; it would perhaps be more helpful to say that hard
deterministic statements are highly oversimplified and misleading, than to say
that they are false (though the latter is true when they are taken literally).
Also, we should note that such false statements can be partially true, and can
point towards interesting directions for further thought; they can also be
made more nearly true by limiting their scope.

In the same style, we can give a precise form for soft technological
deterministic statements, as follows

S1 and T1 => S2 ,

where S1, S2 are social phenomenon, and
where T1 is some technological phenomenon.

One general deficiency of all these forms of theory is that they do not
take account of time, and in particular, of the important fact that both
society and technology change over time. It is very easy to give an improved
form to (for example) soft technological determinism, simply by letting the
indices above refer to time, with S2 at a
later time than S1 and T1.

There is of course an analoguous formulation for soft social determinism,

S1 and T1 => T2 ,

and of course this also has a temporal interpretation.

Although these soft forms are certainly an improvement over the hard forms,
they are still oversimplified, misleading, and in fact false, but for the more
subtle reason that they fail to take account of the fact that there is really
a cycle, or better, feedback loop, in which both social and technological
phenomena are both causes and results. Even if we "unwind" above formulae, to
get what we may call dynamic determinism, of the form

S1 and T1 > S2 and T2
> S3 and T3 > ...
.

where we have replaced the logical implication symbol by a temporal succession
symbol, the result is still overly simple and potentially misleading, and in
particular, fails to take account of the facts that there are multiple social
factors and multple technical factors, that different phenomena evolve at
different rates, that there are many complex relationships among both the
social and the technical factors, and that all these relationships are also
evolving, as well as highly context sensitive. Moreover, in some cases it is
not easy, or even possible, to distinguish between social and technical
factors. These points should become clearer when we study actor-network
theory in Section 6.1.

Now let's consider some examples of social determinist theories.
Politicians often seem to believe that if they want something, and throw
enough money at it, then they will get it; such beliefs are socially
determinist. One counter example is the congressional push for the so-called
Star Wars program, which most responsible scientists consider impossible to
carry out effectively. But Congress says we need defense from rogue state
missiles, and allocates huge sums, apparently in the belief that this will
somehow produce the technology that they want. Another example is
fusion-based energy research, such as the Lawrence Livermore Labs laser
fusion project, which is far over its cost estimates, far behind its delivery
schedule, and of doubtful value. Yes, we need alternative energy sources,
but we cannot get them from science and technology that do not yet exist.

Both technological and social determinism are forms of
reductionism. A reductionist theory reduces some class of phenomena
to some (allegedly) simpler phenomena. One of the best known examples of
this is the reduction of chemistry to physics. At one time, alchemists mixed
substances together just to see what would happen, often with the hope of
eventually manufacturing gold. Later, it became known that matter is
composed of a number of chemicals, and later still, it became known that all
chemicals are molecules composed from atoms, which are the domain of atomic
physics. Although this reduction is true in theory, it unfortunately has
little practical value, because it is not possible to do the quantum
mechanical calculations needed to predict the behavior of molecules, except
in a few trivial cases, such as the hydrogen molecule, let alone of complex
combinations of molecules, such as cells. So even in the hard sciences, even
a reduction that has enormous theoretical significance, may have very little
practical value; now just think what must be the case for reductions in the
social sciences.

A good example of a practically successful reduction is Descartes's
reduction of plane geometry to numbers, through the introduction of so called
Cartesian coordinates, which are pairs of numbers. In many cases, it is
possible to prove difficult theorems in plane geometry with fairly routine
calculations. This reduction also takes us from a qualitative theory to a
quantitative theory. However, it can be argued that there has also been a
loss, namely of the qualitative character of Euclidean axiomatic
geometry. Moreover, certain new complexities have been introduced, such as
the need for many new hypotheses to eliminate special cases, as rather
dramtically demonstrated by computer theorem proving algorithms for geometry,
like Wu's method.

It is worth mentioning that Descartes also wrote what are perhaps the most
influential arguments ever given for reductionism, in his famous Discourse
on Method.

The direct opposite to reductionism is holism, where a holistic
theory says that some process or phenomenon cannot be broken into parts, and
can only be understood as a whole; it follows that such phenomena can never be
explained by reduction. In general, holism is probably true of all complex
phenomena, but since holism does not actually explain anything, it is not
useful as a theory. For this reason, scientists are much more attracted to
reductionist theories, even if they are only partially successful. Moreover,
holism has been abused, for example, by some New Age thinkers.

Today social scientists almost universally reject determinist and
reductionist explanations of complex social phenomena, despite their popular
appeal. They also reject empty holism. Social theories of science and
technology do not in general attempt to be predictive, like physical theories;
they play a different kind of role. For example, one important role of recent
social science theories of technology, such as Actor-Network Theory, is to
serve as an antidote, or vaccine, against naive theories such as technological
determinism; if you achieve a better understanding of the social aspects of
technical work, then you are less vulnerable to confusion, deception and
manipulation.

Marshall McLuhan introduced a special kind of determinism called media
determinism; it tries to explain various social phenomena through
properties of the media that are employed. McLuhan's most famous slogan is
"The medium is the message." Claims that writing, and later on printing,
changed society have been around for a long time, and are still popular.
McLuhan applied this idea to the newspaper, radio, and television media, with
a certain flair and precision. The media love this kind of theory. The
recent slogan that "The computer is the network" can be seen as related to
McLuhan's slogan. Of course, media determinism is a form of technological
determinism, and hence a form of reductionism; it can be hard or soft; and it
is oversimplified, misleading, and in fact is wrong.

An interesting counter example to media determinism is the BBC radio and
television network in the United Kingdom, which provides extremely high
quality non-commercial programming, paid for by British citizens through a
system of taxation. The social input, which includes state sponsorship and a
special tax, leads to very different content than in the American system; the
BBC also has a different technical form, since its programs are broadcast on
standard frequencies throughout the entire country. (BBC radio programs are
also available over the internet; BBC Radio 3 is perhaps the best classical
music station in the world, and BBC Radio 1 is perhaps the best pop music
station, espeicially John Peel's program.) So media determinism is false.
American radio and TV could have been completely different if there had been
different laws, different norms, etc.; technology is not the only factor.

Technological determinism is completely false as an empirical theory; it
exists as a folk theory or social myth. There are no real world examples of
technological determinism and there never can be any: technology is always a
product of society, and therefore technology is never autonomous; moreover,
technology and society are always mutally interacting, always mutually
co-arising. Any alleged example of technology "having an effect on society"
can actually become a counter-example to technological determinism,
because with a little thought you can always find ways in which society also
influenced the technology. (That technology has social effects is obviously
true, but an instance of this is not an instance of technological
determinism, because there will always effects in the other direction as well.
Technology does not come from nowhere, it does not drop from the sky, or grow
from the earth, it is created by complex human social organizations.)
Nevertheless examples of assertions that have the form of
technological determinism are very common, especially in advertising and mass
media journalism. Sometimes such assertions are merely shorthand for what the
author and audience know is a more complex phenomenon, but often such
assertions are deliberately misleading and manipulative, exploiting our
unconscious implicit folk theory belief in technological determinism, in order
to promote some product, ideology, organization, etc.

In case you doubt that appeals to technological determinism can be a
problem, here are some further examples. An article in the local paper
contained the sentence "Cloning is inevitable once it is possible" and a call
for papers for a conference IT: Education
Technology, Curriculum and Assessment contains the sentence "Emerging
information technologies revolutionize education and improve it dramatically."
These texts are written as if the phenomena involved had nothing to do with
their contexts of people and other things, but had a unstopable momentum of
their own. A simple example of an assertion that probably we've all heard,
and that embodies technological determinism, is the aphorism "If you build a
better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door." It is very easy
to find counter examples to (the generalized meaning of) this assertion, but
it still can sound plausible. I hope that this little essay will help to
reduce its evil potency.